Danes, Swedes impose new border checks

Danish police on patrol on highway E45 close to Padborg, Denmark, near the border with Germany, January 4 after Denmark introduced temporary controls along its border with Germany. EPA/Claus Fisker

Copenhagen, Reuters – Denmark has imposed temporary identity checks on its border with Germany following a similar move by Sweden, dealing a double blow to Europe’s fraying passport-free Schengen area amid a record influx of migrants.

Sweden began checking documents of travellers from Denmark on Monday for the first time in half a century, causing delays of up to 50 minutes for trains and buses crossing the 7.9km Oresund Bridge, Europe’s longest combined road and rail bridge. However private vehicles were exempt from the checks.

Denmark’s prime minister said Sweden’s move gave his country no option but to impose its own border controls and he appealed to the European Union to take ‘collective decisions’ to better protect its external borders against the tide of migrants.

‘The Swedish ID checks can increase the risk of a large number of illegal immigrants to accumulate in and around Copenhagen,’ Lars Lokke Rasmussen told a news conference in Copenhagen, justifying the new controls on the German border.

Last year some 163,000 refugees sought asylum in Sweden, the largest number for any EU country relative to its population. But with arrivals running at around 10,000 a week in November, mostly travelling through Denmark, the Swedish government has said it is time to tighten border controls and asylum rules.

‘A dark day for our Nordic region,’ former centre-right Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt said on his Twitter feed on Monday to describe the imposition of border checks.

Thousands of commuters daily use the Oresund Bridge – familiar to fans of the ‘Nordic noir’ crime drama series ‘The Bridge’ – to shuttle by car, train and bus between the Danish capital Copenhagen and the Swedish city of Malmo.